Smashing the Stereotype

It has become an automatic media reflex: put the words Smashing and Pumpkins together and we just can't help adding the phrases "turbulent career", "drug problems" and "dogged by tragedy". Wherever The Smashing Pumpkins go, the rock'n'roll cliches seem to follow - but as the Chicago band prepares to release its fourth album, Adore, head Pumpkin Billy Corgan just isn't buying those hackneyed associations anymore.

It's the eve of The Smashing Pumpkins' concert at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, and the tall, shaven-headed singer is sitting in a hotel lounge, dressed in black and looking every bit the tragic, tortured figure the media has painted him to be. Except he's not that person. That's a cliche, and as he's just told us, Billy's not buying it any more.

This is the second anniversary of the death of Bernadette O'Brien, who was killed in crushing at the Pumpkins' Point concert, and it's also close to two years since the band's touring keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin, died of a drugs overdose following a concert in New York. The Pumpkins' drummer, Jimmy Chamberlin, was with Melvoin at the time of the keyboard player's death, and was subsequently fired by Corgan because of his continued drug addiction. The band's annus horribilis was topped off by the death of Corgan's mother and the break-up of his marriage. Shiny, happy Pumpkin people? Not quite.

But Corgan is determined not to let himself be defined by these tragedies, and as the band embarks on a promotional tour for the new album, the singer is trying hard to push the media's gaze away from the scene of the disaster and in the direction of the music, waxing enthusiastically about Adore, eager to make us understand that The Smashing Pumpkins are not only very much together, but they're also doing their best work ever. Adore finds The Smashing Pumpkins at their most low-key and introspective, but it also shows the band at their strongest, their most melodic and, strangely, their most outgoing.

"All the songs were kind of written as folk songs," explains Corgan. "If you heard unplugged versions of the songs, they'd be like these weird Appalachian folk songs, so I guess that was the unifying factor. We just took each song in a different direction during the production. But it all comes from the same place."

Which, incidentally, isn't a place of pain, despite the personal upheavals of the past couple of years. Adore is a compassionate album, a reflection on life and love, and its black facade conceals a bright inner light. Having shed the cathartic weight of Siamese Dream and the epic drama of Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, Smashing Pumpkins are left with just their bare, unchained hearts.

"I thought this was so much easier to write than Mellon Collie," says Corgan, "Because we weren't trying to live up to anything, musically. We didn't have to be The Smashing Pumpkins any more. It was really freeing for me, totally liberating. The constraints came later in the album when I started to write heavy rock stuff again, and we were, like, we can't use this, because it would have changed the scope of the album and pushed it back towards that sound. We had 18 acoustic songs and two heavy ones, so the writing was on the wall, and I said, `OK, this is going to have to be a quiet album'."

Following the sacking of Chamberlin the three remaining members - Corgan, D'Arcy Wretzky and James Iha - were forced to realign themselves, not only in the studio but also on stage. The Pumpkins who played at the Olympia last Sunday night were very different from the Pumpkins who had to abandon their 1996 show at the Point due to crowd crushing. The band has grown up and gotten its priorities straight. Its members have learned to be more open and honest with each other. They've also stopped hiding behind their legendary wall of noise, and Sunday's show at the Olympia revealed a wonderful, almost-classical sense of colour and mood, not to mention a sharpened ear for melodic detail. Old habits die hard, however, and Corgan admits that he's been tempted to crank up the ol' distortion pedal once more. Especially since, on this tour, the group have chosen to play only four old songs, keeping the live emphasis firmly on material from Adore. The perfect way to get abuse instead of adoration?

"You know, honestly I thought there was going to be a lot more resistance, but the reaction so far has been unbelievable. What really changed my mind about all that was, we were doing a three-week tour of Europe in the middle of making the album, and we thought, it's going to be tough on the audiences, because we won't be doing all the stuff that they want to hear, but f--k it. So we get up on stage and we're prepared for all this resistance, and it was fantastic. And it just said to me, if you believe in what you do and you feel good about it, people are into that."

In their home country, however, The Smashing Pumpkins are still fighting against typecast, which says they must be loud, grungey, and always play the hits. Corgan, however, prefers to play with preconceptions, and on Adore he toys with the notion of The Smashing Pumpkins as a bunch of unreconstructed Goths. The album's cover art could have been borrowed from an old Sisters Of Mercy album, and the band's macabre costumes on the video for the current single, Ava Adore, could have been nicked from Nosferatu The Vampyre. Corgan lets out a not-quite-evil cackle.

"We're taking the piss so much, and unfortunately people don't pick up on that at all, which shows how serious everybody is. It's like somebody said to us once, `I don't understand you guys, because I go to see you live, and you're playing in an arena, and the hands are up in the air, and you're playing guitar solos, and then you stop in the middle of the song and make fun of what you just did'. I said, well, we love it, and because we love it we can embrace it and we can piss on it. "And we have such a healthy respect for rock, we're the best promoters of rock, we promoted bands like Boston and ELO, but we'll also say, there's a lot of bullshit going on there. That's because we love it. It's a respect for it, it's like making fun of your family or something. James's favourite song is Total Eclipse Of The Heart, it's like his number one song of all time. But OK, you laugh, but get a copy of Total Eclipse and listen to it - it's an unbelievable song. It's an amazing vocal performance, great words, but there's something about it that makes you go, urrgh!"

You can see Corgan's point, especially when you remember that the band's biggest hit, 1979, sounded uncomfortably like something The Dream Academy might write as an accompaniment to Life In A Northern Town. The band's mischievous sense of humour, however, has been largely lost on a media whose sights are firmly set on the band's dark side.

"I've grown tired of this idea of me as the King of Pain. It makes for an interesting story, but it doesn't make for an interesting life." Did you ever unwittingly contribute to this distorted perception? "Oh, yeah, I naively fed into it, and I didn't realise what I was getting myself into. I wasn't savvy enough or worldly enough to even realise I was digging myself deeper and deeper into a big hole. And it's a hole which I'm now only just climbing out of. Thankfully the work is strong enough that I believe it'll ultimately overcome that. We all make mistakes, and there's nothing you can say about me that really bothers me that much. "I know what I am - I'm a court jester. Fans of the band do not think of us as a morose bunch of sullen people, and that's the saddest thing, because I know that on a certain level it's colouring some people's perception of the work, so someone who might get a lot out of this music could go, `I don't wanna listen to them, I wanna listen to some upbeat techno which is fuelled by a bunch of people on drugs'."

After the sacking of Chamberlin and the events which led up to it, The Smashing Pumpkins would have had every reason to be uncheerful, but they've managed to come back smiling, and with an album of superb new songs for fans to adore. Was it a difficult journey back?

"We just kind of took it one step at a time. The first thing was to get back on stage, and as it went along, things became obvious, and things came up that we never thought of. You know, people focus on Jimmy's drumming, but I miss him just being around as a personality, like part of the Marx Brothers. I mean he's the one who would be sitting in on an interview and he'd blind-side the journalist with a killer one-liner. You know, I miss that.

"Bad things happen to everybody, it's nothing special. When somebody dies, you have to ask yourself, `what's life really all about? What's really important here?' The things that happened to me made me go back and think, what's really important to me? After the tragedy at the Point, I had to say, is rock'n'roll really important to me? After my mother died I had to say, is rock'n'roll important to me or is my family more important? We all ask ourselves these same questions and we all have to ponder them."

Fact File

Formed: Chicago, 1987 as a duo featuring Billy Corgan, James Iha and a drum machine.

Debut Album: Gish, 1991, released in the US in the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind. Corgan and Kurt Cobain became musical rivals, sharing a producer in Butch Vig, and also clashing over Corgan's then girlfriend, Courtney Love.

Biggest success: Double-album, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, featuring the hit singles, 1979, and Bullet With Butterfly Wings.